Death and Dying Experiences

Death and Dying Experiences
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Death and dying affects different parties involved differently from the patient that is dying and the family members to the medical practitioners. Zambrano and Barton try to evaluate the kind of experience that the general practitioners have with their dying patients along side some other medical professionals such as the physicians. This journey with the dying patients has been divided into five distinctive stages namely the; acknowledgement, diagnosis communication, care of the patient, the moment of death and the last stage where the medical practitioners look out for the families. In all of the stages of the journey, the practitioners had ways of coping with the experience of death laid out as a mechanism. Other than the fact that they had devised a mechanism to monitor death of the patient, the appraisal of death was more crucial (Zambrano & Barton, 2011). Other factors included the timelessness of death, awareness of death, learning about death, professional identity, death beliefs, personal performance evaluation and finality of death.
When the patient takes a long time to die, there is the anticipatory grief, in which case the parties have time to adjust to the expectations of loss. As for the medical teams, they have time to indulge in guilt and at the moment of death the feeling will have subsided. While the general practitioners have a tendency to be affected by their first experience while still students in training, the doctors and the physicians are trained to contain their emotions and therefore react differently in times of death or towards their dying patients. This is in view of maintaining the medical and professional objectiveness in the physicians. For most of the GPs in the study, the training does not prepare them properly for experience. For the GPs, the experience of death goes beyond the moment of death and thus they have a more profound relationship.
An article by Sara (2013) goes into details about the World Trade Centre (W.T.C) and the horrors of death and dying moments. For the people at the W.T.C, the death and dying can be split into three sections, where some of the victims had a sudden death, others had at most 102 minutes in which they suffered excruciating pain before they died and those that made a deliberate decision on how they were going to die (Sara, 2013). Among the last groups, there are those that decided to jump from the windows of the burning floors. The 102 minutes presents the time frame that the victims had between the time that the first airplane made contact and the time that the building came down. In between these events, the victims had to make very rational decisions about how they were going to handle the death situation with the options that presented th...